Searching for Dropbox alternatives? Wondering if you should even bother? Ask someone to name a cloud storage service off the top of their head and it’s a fair bet “Dropbox” will be the answer. Last time anyone checked, in May 2016, Dropbox had more than 500 million registered users, beating the competition by a mile.

There’s no question Dropbox is a good cloud storage platform: you don’t build a userbase of half a billion on smoke and mirrors. The question is whether or not it’s truly the best cloud storage platform and that’s a question with a whole bunch of different answers.

During this overview, we’ll be taking a look at ten cloud storage services besides Dropbox that deserve your consideration. While most of the picks in this group may not have near the following that Dropbox does, in one way or another we found they exceeded it as a service, whether that be security, user experience or value.

What Makes Dropbox Good?

To determine what makes another service better, let’s first look at what Dropbox does well: behind Dropbox’s popularity is a feature set that’s as well-rounded as any in the market as you can read in our Dropbox review. At the core of it all are Dropbox’s file-syncing capabilities.

Dropbox, in fact, invented the sync-folder model commonly used by most cloud storage services today. The concept was conceived by Houston in 2007, after he realized while on a bus ride from Boston to New York that he’d left his thumb drive behind.

While most of the competition may mimic the model, very few execute sync as well as Dropbox. Test Dropbox’s sync capabilities against two of its big competitors, Google Drive and OneDrive, and Dropbox will outperform them both, at least when it comes to syncing changes to files already copied to cloud storage. The reason for this that Dropbox is one of the few cloud storage services that uses block-level sync.

Dropbox also has excellent content-sharing capabilities. You can invite other users to access folders and files either by email address or by generating a link. Dropbox Plus users can password-protect links, too, to help keep them secure.

On top of that, Dropbox has a handy note-taking app called Dropbox Paper which comes pre-integrated with Office Online, which lets you edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents directly from the Dropbox web interface. We’ve compared Dropbox Paper vs Google Docs if you’d like to know more.

The Case for a Dropbox Alternative

While Dropbox may be the popular kid, there are many other cloud storage services out there. Many of these services don’t necessarily beat Dropbox on every front; instead, they may beat Dropbox in just one or two crucial areas. Depending on your cloud storage priorities, those one or two things may be more than enough to justify jumping ship.

Dropbox Security

So what are the reasons you may want to leave Dropbox behind? Well, the company has had some trouble with security ever since it started. The largest and most talked abou breach is the 2012 theft of the emails and passwords from over 68 million Dropbox users.

To be fair, about half of the stolen password were hashed using bycrpt, which should render them unusable. The other half of the passwords were hashed using SHA-1, a much weaker algorithm. Dropbox reportedly has tightened control and has changed its password hashing algorithms multiple times since 2012 to prevent a repeat.

Still, it’s also fair to point out that Dropbox didn’t reveal the full extent of the hack until 2016, when some of those stolen email addresses and hashed passwords showed up for sale online.

We can certainly forgive users for being skittish and not wanting to trust Dropbox with their data, especially when there are much more secure options out there, including zero-knowledge cloud storage services. You find several more secure alternatives to Dropbox in the list below.

Dropbox Privacy

In addition to lackluster security, Dropbox privacy is something of a concern. As the largest cloud storage service in the world, Dropbox is a treasure-trove of user data that lots of people (hackers, marketers and suits, mostly) would love to get their hands on.

Dropbox is on the list of providers known to be involved with the NSA’s PRISM project. PRISM is a data collection program designed to locate terrorists. However, to find terrorists, the NSA collects data from everyone, and it’s legally justified in doing so by the Patriot Act.

Dropbox can and does block certain files from being shared under the guidance of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). To do this, Dropbox doesn’t actually scan your cloud storage. It looks at your content when you share it, which isn’t quite as bad. However, a few cloud storage services provide zero-knowledge file sharing, which would prevent this from happening.

Additionally, a handful of the services we’ll recommend are in more privacy-friendly locations than the U.S.: As an example of the current state of consumer privacy in the U.S., as of a few months ago, ISPs are once again legally allowed to spy on user data and sell it to third-parties without giving consumers the opportunity to opt out.

Dropbox Free Storage and Dropbox Plus

Maybe more than better security and privacy, our readers often ask about Dropbox alternatives with more free storage. Dropbox only gives you a paltry 2GB to work with, which if you need to store high definition photos and 4k videos, won’t take you very far.

Dropbox also only has one consumer plan available, called Dropbox Plus. Dropbox Plus gets you 1TB for $9.99 a month. There are more flexible cloud storage option out there that give you more or less storage, and come at a better price.

The Best Dropbox Alternatives

Those are just the three most common reason we hear from people shopping for Dropbox replacements. There, no doubt, many more. Rather than figure out how many holes we can poke in Dropbox, though, let’s get onto the good stuff.

The following cloud storage solutions are our picks for the best Dropbox alternatives. While we’ve ranked them roughly in order of preference, every user’s going to be a little different. Our advice, if you see a couple that sound enticing, sign up for a free trial to see how you like it. There’s no harm in taking any of the below out for a test drive.

Sync.com

Toronto-based Sync.com has been a Cloudwards.net favorite for some time now, and all you need do is read our Sync.com review to see why. It holds the top spot in our overall cloud storage rankings and ranks as one of our favorite services in two key categories when it comes to besting Dropbox:

As far as free storage, Sync.com actually only gives you 5GB for signing up. Why the love, then? It’s because Sync.com also gives you a whole gigabyte of added storage for every friend you convince to sign up. Even better, the company doesn’t put any restrictions on how many friends you can recommend, unlike most other cloud storage referral programs. To help you lure Sync.com referrals, your friends get an extra gigabyte, too.

Aside from giving you more gratis storage than Dropbox, Sync.com also has better deals on subscriptions.

Sync.com’s 2TB plan works out to $8 per month on an annual contract, cheaper than Dropbox Plus, which gets you just a single terabyte. Also, Sync.com has a 500GB plan for half the cost. Dropbox doesn’t.

It also means that the Sync.com doesn’t store copies of your password or encryption keys. So, in the event of a hack like that which hit Dropbox in 2012, there would be no passwords to steal, hashed or not.

Making this service more enticing, Sync.com takes secure file sharing to a whole other level. Like with a Dropbox Plus subscription, Sync.com lets you password-protect links. However, it doesn’t restrict that capability to paying customers. Curiously, a Sync.com Pro subscription is required to set link expiry dates … but at least it’s an option.

Sync.com also gives you the advantage being able to set download limits on link shares, which very few cloud storage services, let alone Dropbox, do. Another neat trick: you can remote wipe data on any share.

However, we’re most impressed with a Sync.com setting that lets you extend zero-knowledge protection to any link shared. Just click the “enhanced privacy” box when setting up a share.

Syncing with Sync.com works pretty much like it does with Dropbox. You download a desktop client that installs a sync folder on your desktop. Content in that sync folder gets stored on both the cloud and your hard drive.

Sync.com provides great sync speeds overall, but don’t expect it to be as fast as Dropbox. Unlike Dropbox, Sync.com doesn’t use block-level copying. There’s a good reason for that, though: zero-knowledge encryption and block-level copying can’t coexist because block-level copying requires that the service be able to read your files.

Rather than move folders and files to your sync folder, you can right-click on them and send them directly something called the Sync.com “vault.” Files in the vault don’t get synced to your devices. It’s basically a secure file archive, which is something you don’t get with Dropbox.

On a final note, Sync.com benefits from its Canadian location. Canada has more consumer-friendly privacy laws than the U.S., where Dropbox is located and so puts your content out of reach of the NSA and its three-letter brethren. That should be reason enough for you to visit Sync.com and check out the trial.

pCloud

Like Sync.com, pCloud makes this list mostly on the strength of its approach to cloud security, although there are plenty of other reasons to love it, too. pCloud ranks second on our best cloud storage comparison chart for a reason, after all.

As you can read in our pCloud review, the service gives you 10GB of free storage, five times more than Dropbox does, and you can increase it to 20GB by following certain steps, like referring friends and backing up your social media accounts.

If you need more storage than that, pCloud has two subscription plans that you can sign up for.

Those options include a 2TB plan that’s cheaper than Dropbox Plus (1TB) and a 500GB plan if you don’t need that much storage. Unlike with Sync.com, zero-knowledge encryption doesn’t come included in the pCloud pricing and will set you back $3.99 per month regardless of which plan you’re adding it to.

On top of that, pCloud lets you subscribe to a custom plan that lets you set your own storage allotment and bandwidth; as far as we can tell, there’s no limit to how much storage you can get this way. Given that Dropbox caps you at 1TB, that’s a good reason for users with larger storage needs to give pCloud a look.

If you’d like to use pCloud along with Dropbox, it actually lets you backup your Dropbox storage from its web interface. Other backup options include Google Drive and OneDrive.

However, pCloud takes a slightly more complex approach to cloud storage than some users may like. When you download the pCloud client, it sets up something called pCloud Drive on your file system. Rather than a sync folder, this is a network drive that lets you access content stored in the pCloud network without having to sync it to your computer.

However, if you want to store content both on your devices and in the cloud, there’s a pCloud sync folder for that, too, meaning you end up getting the best of both worlds.

pCloud also gives you access to a full desktop interface rather than forcing you to use a web interface for most things, like Dropbox does. The experience is somewhat clunkier than the pCloud web interface is, though, so it’s not likely to be something that will appeal to most users.

As far as folder and file link security, pCloud lets you set link passwords and expiry dates. Like with Dropbox, though, you’ll need to be a paying subscriber to use these features. pCloud includes an additional feature that lets you shorten links, but otherwise it isn’t nearly as advanced as link sharing with Sync.com.

If you’re looking for one last reason to choose pCloud over Dropbox, it’s a great option to store music, and not just because it gives you more space than Dropbox: pCloud actually lets you stream music directly from the cloud.

Sadly for us freeloaders, SpiderOak doesn’t provide any free storage, so it’s not going to help you over Dropbox in that regard. For the record, most backup services don’t give you any free gigabytes: the reason being that device backup generally recovers tens or hundreds of gigabytes at least, so giving users a few gigabytes for free doesn’t really make sense as a strategy.

That works out to about $30 more for month for 1TB of space than Dropbox.

If you’re looking for just cloud storage, you probably don’t want to consider SpiderOak as an alternative over Dropbox; at least, not when Sync.com and pCloud are options. However, if you need both a storage and backup service, SpiderOak is a terrific hybrid option that will appeal to the technically inclined users but still provides a smooth, user-friendly experience.

When you install the SpiderOak client, you gain access to a desktop interface that lets you manage both backup and sync. The backup tab lets you create a backup plan, including selecting folders and files for backup and creating a schedule for when that backup will run.

The sync tab lets you see what content you’re currently syncing. Installing SpiderOak client also creates a sync folder on your desktop called “hive” that works like any other sync folder. Once again, sync with SpiderOak isn’t nearly as fast as Dropbox because SpiderOak, like Sync.com and pCloud, is a zero-knowledge provider.

Zero-knowledge capabilities are included in the subscription price of SpiderOak. Unfortunately, file shares via link aren’t zero knowledge and there’s not way to make them so. Also, SpiderOak doesn’t offer password security for links. There’s also no option to set expiry dates, although SpiderOak links do expire automatically after three days, anyway. The result of these misses is that while SpiderOak is more secure in most respects than Dropbox, it isn’t quite as pleasant to use.

For more information on why we think SpiderOak is better than Dropbox, check out our full SpiderOak vs Dropbox article.

IDrive

IDrive is first and foremost a cloud backup service, as you can read in our IDrive review. However, like SpiderOak it also gives you sync capabilities, making it a viable Dropbox alternative if you’re looking for a hybrid solution. Better yet, it’s also much cheaper than SpiderOak and Dropbox.

IDrive is one of the few backup services that actually gives you free storage, to get your free 5GB visit IDrive and sign up.

The subscription costs are outstanding, with a current offer of $52.12 for 2TB of storage for the first year (after which, it bumps up to $69.50). That’s about half the cost of Dropbox and twice the storage. It gets better, too: you’re not forced to split that 2TB between backup and storage. Instead, both get their own separate allotment.

If 2TB isn’t enough, you can bump up to 5TB for $74.62 for the first year. The cost increases to $99.50 after the first year, but that’s still about what it costs for 1TB of storage with Dropbox.

Given its dual sync and backup capabilities, matching buckets and low cost, IDrive ranks as one of the best deals in cloud storage and cloud backup both.

IDrive also provides much better security for your files than Dropbox. By default, IDrive stores your password and encryption keys in its data center. However, you can elect to turn on private encryption if you want, effectively making it a zero-knowledge provider.

IDrive can also be used to share folder and files with others. Unlike Dropbox, it provides password-protection for links regardless of whether you pay for service or not. It also lets you share directly to Facebook or Twitter.

MEGA

MEGA is the fourth zero-knowledge cloud storage provider to make this list. However, like Dropbox, MEGA comes with baggage that will likely scare some users off. Below an overview, for the full picture make sure to read our MEGA review.

MEGA is the successor of the now defunct Megaupload, which had its servers seized in 2012 by the FBI for hosting pirated content. Megaupload’s founder, Kim Dotcom, started MEGA a year later. While Dotcom’s name doesn’t engender confidence in data security given the interest the U.S. government has in him, he hasn’t been associated with MEGA since 2015.

However, Dotcom left the best part of his brand behind: free storage. For those tired of Dropbox’s stingy 2GB, the 50GB you get with MEGA should do the trick. In fact, that’s far more than you get with any other good cloud storage service and will likely be plenty for most user’s needs.

If you do need more cloud storage, MEGA has four personal plan options.

MEGA certainly provides more options than Dropbox for users who don’t need 1TB of storage or for whom 1TB isn’t enough. If all you need is 1TB, however, you will pay more with MEGA.

If that includes you, the only real reason to choose MEGA over Dropbox is its zero-knowledge encryption, which is included for free. In fact, zero-knowledge encryption is mandatory with MEGA.

MEGA takes a unique approach to security. When you share a file, an encryption key is generated for that file without MEGA’s knowledge. You can either send the link to recipients without that key and provide it separately, or you can send a link with the key embedded in it. The key functions like a link password except that it’s more secure.

While it doesn’t have anything in the way of integrations with third-party productivity programs, MEGA does have a chat interface for talking with collaborators. MEGA launched a secure Skype competitor in beta version in 2015, but that service no longer appears to be on the table.

Microsoft OneDrive

OneDrive is an obvious choice to this list, although it’s beset with some of the same weaknesses as Dropbox. In fact, not only does OneDrive not include an option for private encryption, only OneDrive business accounts get encrypted server-side in Microsoft’s datacenters.

That oversight means files stored by individual consumers in OneDrive are left in plaintext form, which makes them readable by Microsoft employees and anybody who happens to gain entry to the OneDrive data centers. As such, if you need a secure Dropbox substitute, we’d advise you stick with any of the above options.

However, if you’re looking for cheaper cloud storage and a better work productivity platform, OneDrive might be the way to go: as you can read in our OneDrive review, the service offers excellent value.

The 50GB option is nice option to have, but the real value is in Microsoft’s Office 365 Plans. Both get you desktop versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Both also get you OneNote, which ranks as one of the best note-taking apps available.

In addition to Office 365, you get 1TB of storage for $3 less per month than the cost of Dropbox Plus. The 5TB family plan, meanwhile, gives five people 1TB of storage for the same cost as Dropbox Plus.

OneDrive is also the only Dropbox alternative on this list that uses block-level sync. However, at this time that feature is only available for Microsoft Office document types.

Google Drive

If you’re a Gmail, Google Plus or Android user, you already have a 15GB of free Google Drive storage, 13GB more than you get with Dropbox. On top of that, Google Drive has the most flexible lineup of storage options of any cloud storage service we’ve reviewed. You can pay for as little as 100GB or as much as 30TB.

Google also lets you use its native work productivity suite for free. This includes:

Google Docs: for word processing

Google Sheets: for spreadsheets

Google Slides: for presentations

On top of that, Google Drive integrates with hundreds of other productivity apps, many of which are free. Options include photo editors like Pixlr, .pdf editors like DocuHub and electronic signature tools like DocuSign.

Unlike OneDrive, Google Drive does encrypt files stored on its servers. It started doing so in 2013, following public outcry that Google, like Dropbox, had been roped into the PRISM project. While that’s great Google Drive doesn’t include an option for private, end-to-end encryption. This means your files can be scanned and analyzed, which Google has admits to doing in its privacy policy.

“Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.”

Google scans your files in part to check for viruses, but also to use that information to delivering tailored search results and targeted advertisements. The Google privacy terms also grant the company leave to use your content a bit more broadly than many users are okay with:

“When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.”

That’s all a bit sketchy but doesn’t entirely diminish the value of Google Drive over Dropbox when it comes to work productivity. Specifically, all of the great application integrations Google Drive has makes it still worth using.

That said, when it comes to storing confidential information and archiving files, we’d recommend pairing Google Drive with Sync.com, pCloud, SpiderOak or even MEGA. Check out of our Sync.com and Google Drive collaboration article for a better analysis of using those two services together.

Box

Box is a much bigger name in the SMB and enterprise cloud-storage space than it is for everyday consumers. The service is used by clients like General Electric, Schneider Electric, Pandora and FICO.

Box does have a personal plan but most users will like find that it’s too expensive to make for a viable Dropbox replacement: While it costs $10 a month, like Dropbox, you only get 100GB of storage.

For business users, however, Box has two reasonably priced subscriptions, both of which charge per user and require a minimum of three licenses (read our Box review for the full skinny on how this works).

Dropbox also has two business plans, which also both require that you pay for at least three licenses. The options include a 2TB plan (shared storage) for $15 per user and an unlimited plan for $25 per user.

If you need around 2TB, there’s reason to stick with Dropbox. If you’re okay with 100GB or need an unlimited plan, though, Box could mean big savings for your business.

Like Dropbox, Box integrates with Microsoft Office Online to boost productivity. However, Box also has the advantage of integrating with Google Docs. That means if your employees and clients can pick the productivity suite that works best for them. Box also has an integrated notes application called Box Notes that matches up well with Dropbox Paper.

Where Box really outpaces Dropbox Business, however, is when it comes to app integrations. Box Business subscribers can access a searchable app library to find options sorted by categories like collaboration, project management and security.

Box also has much better user management features than Dropbox. From an admin console, you can give users one of seven different roles when setting up folder access:

Box doesn’t offer integrated private encryption. This would be less disappointing if it offered block-level syncing like Dropbox, but it doesn’t. You can opt to encrypt your files yourself, though. Like Dropbox Business, Box integrates with Boxcryptor.

Egnyte Connect

Like Box, Egnyte Connect makes this list as a business alternative to Dropbox. Egnyte, in fact, doesn’t even have an individual user plan. Subscriptions start with its Office plan, which requires at least five users.

Both Office and Business plans are shared storage plans like Dropbox Business. Egnyte Connect Office costs almost half as much as Dropbox Business Standard, however, and gives you 3TB more storage to work with. Egnyte Connect Business, meanwhile, costs $10 less per month than Dropbox Business Advanced. You don’t get unlimited storage, but you do get 10TB, which for many SMB owners will be plenty of storage.

Making Egnyte even more compelling is that it’s one of the few cloud storage platform that can truly run with Dropbox when it comes to sync. That’s because, like Dropbox, it uses block-level sync for all file types. That feature greatly speeds up productivity when multiple users are working on the same document, because it lets users see file changes made by others much more quickly.

To help with collaborations, Egnyte also integrates with both Office Online and Google Docs, while Dropbox only integrates with Office Online. Egnyte has excellent role management features and reporting tools to help make sure your collaborations don’t get out of control. In addition, Egnyte has built-in task management tracking capabilities, which Dropbox does not.

Third-party integrations with multiple work productivity tools are also available, including Trello, DocuSign and even Google Drive; for a full list, check out our Egnyte review.

Egnyte has a beautiful web interface and outstanding mobile experience on top of everything else. We actually rank Egnyte Connect ahead of both Dropbox Business and Box Business in best EFSS solution roundup and ranked it the second best value overall, only behind OneDrive Business.

Amazon Drive

Despite very good pricing, Amazon Drive went through some early struggles competing with Dropbox because it offered storage but no syncing. That’s now changed with sync clients for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS.

If you’re an Amazon customer, you already have 5GB of free cloud storage. Amazon also has two reasonably priced subscription plans.

That’s forty dollars less per year for a terabyte of storage than Dropbox. Plus, there’s a 100GB option that works out to a dollar a month. If that wasn’t enough of a reason to ditch Dropbox for Amazon Drive, you get access to Prime Photos, too, which lets you upload unlimited photos without eating into your storage.

The Amazon Drive desktop client works just like Dropbox by installing a sync folder on your hard drive. Any content that goes into that folder gets sent to the cloud and other other devices with sync clients installed.

Even better, as you can read in our Amazon Drive review, the service uses block-level sync, making the only other cloud storage option besides Egnyte to match Dropbox with that technology.

Amazon Drive uses Amazon S3 to store your data, which is the same storage network it uses for business clients. This uses 256-bit AES to protect your files server side.

Downsides to going with Amazon Drive over Dropbox include no option to password-protect shared links and no work productivity app integrations. On top of that, Amazon Drive doesn’t provide an option for zero-knowledge encryption.

Final Thoughts

That’s our list of top Dropbox alternatives! While not every option the list may be as good as Dropbox is as an all-around service, each at least does a couple of things better than Dropbox, making them excellent replacement options.

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Of course, we might have missed a service or two. Let us know in the comments below if you things we got it right, or if you have any thoughts on the selections above. Thanks for reading.

4 thoughts on “Best Dropbox Alternatives”

I have a free subscription to One Drive for 1TB of storage courtesy of Microsoft Office 365. Both BoxCryptor and Sync cost the same albeit half the storage of One Drive ($49 plan). Should I use Sync or BoxCryptor especially since One Drive permits the upload of Folders? What are the advantages of Sync over One Drive with BoxCryptor?

For me, it’s ease-of-use. If you choose Sync everything just works and I don’t have to think about what folders I encrypt etc… Also, Sync has a feature I need which is upload enabled links: you can send send people those links and have them upload contents to the folder in a secure manner.